special-env-vars.md

copyright	lastupdated	keywords	subcollection
years 2017, 2022	2022-10-27	parallelism, schematics parallelism, environment variables, command-line configuration, env vars	schematics

{{site.data.keyword.attribute-definition-list}}

Supporting Terraform environment variables in {{site.data.keyword.bplong_notm}}

{: #set-parallelism}

Terraform uses various environment variables to customize different aspects of its behavior. These environment variables are used to increase the output verbosity for debugging or rarely used in runtime.

Parallelism is one of the environment variable with a number flag range between 1 and 256, the default value is 10. Parallelism is used to fix infrastructure providers that error on concurrent operations or use during non-standard rate limiting, when you execute terraform plan and terraform apply at runtime.

Now {{site.data.keyword.bplong}} supports setting a custom value for parallelism. {: shortdesc}

Usage

{: #parelleism-usage}

You can pass Terraform command-line arguments TF_CLI_ARGS as an environment variables with the specific name such as TF_CLI_ARGS_plan, and TF_CLI_ARGS_apply in the {{site.data.keyword.bpshort}} Workspaces for a customized experience. Terraform reads these environment variables and apply parallelism at runtime. For more information about Terraform command-line arguments, see TF_CLI_ARGS and TF_CLI_ARGS_name{: external}.

Example using parallelism

{: #parallelism-example}

The code block is the sample payload for creating workspace with parallelism passed as an environment variable.

{
    "name": "bb",
    "type": [
        "terraform_v1.0"
    ],
    "template_repo": {
        "url": "url"
    },
    "template_data": [
        {
        "folder": ".",
        "type": "terraform_v1.0",
        "variablestore": [
        {
          "value": "<val>",
          "name": "ibmcloud_api_key",
          "type": "string",
          "secure": true
        }
        ],
        "env_values": [
        {
          "TF_LOG": "debug"
        },
        {
          "TF_CLI_ARGS_apply": "-parallelism=20"
        },
        {
          "TF_CLI_ARGS_plan": "-parallelism=20"
        }
        ]
    }
    ]
}

{: codeblock}

A sample env_values block in the payload to update environment variable by using variable update API. For more information, see Update workspace input variables API.

"env_values": [
    {
        "name": "TF_CLI_ARGS_plan",
        "value": "-parallelism=20",
        "secure": false,
        "hidden": false
    },
    {
        "name": "TF_CLI_ARGS_apply",
        "value": "-parallelism=20",
        "secure": false,
        "hidden": false
    }
    ]

{: codeblock}

For content catalog Terraform workspaces, you can pass a special variable TF_PARALLELISM in tf_values to set parallelism.

A sample tf_values block in the create payload.

    "tf_values":{
    "sample_var": "hello",
    "sleepy_time": "5",
    "TF_VERSION" : "1.0",
    "TF_PARALLELISM": "20"
}

{: codeblock}

List of environment variables

{: #list-special-env-vars}

{{site.data.keyword.bplong_notm}} supports following environment variables for debugging purpose. For more information about special environment variables, see Environment variables.

Variable	Description	Usage
TF_LOG	The detailed logs that appear on standard error. Support values are TRACE, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, or ERROR	"TF_LOG": "TRACE"
TF_INPUT	Command to disable prompts for entering the input value. The default value is false or 0.	"TF_INPUT": "0"
TF_CLI_ARGS and TF_CLI_ARGS_name	The TF_CLI_ARGS specify additional arguments to the command-line. This allows easier automation in cloud infrastructure environments. Also to modify the default behavior of the Terraform on your own system. TF_CLI_ARGS and TF_CLI_ARGS_name is only for non content catalog.	"TF_CLI_ARGS_apply": "-parallelism=20"
TF_REGISTRY_DISCOVERY_RETRY	Set the maximum number of request retries the remote registry client can attempt for client connection errors.	"TF_REGISTRY_DISCOVERY_RETRY": "10"
TF_REGISTRY_CLIENT_TIMEOUT	Set to increase the extraneous circumstances. The default value for the remote registry is 10 seconds.	"TF_REGISTRY_CLIENT_TIMEOUT": "15"
TF_IGNORE	Output the debug messages to display ignored files and folders. This is useful when you debug large repositories with .terraformignore files. The default value is trace.	"TF_IGNORE": "trace"
TF_PARALLELISM	Read parallelism environment variable in runtime action and reset the parallelism value on all the {{site.data.keyword.bpshort}} Actions only for content catalog. TF_PARALLELISM is only for content catalog.	"TF_PARALLELISM": "20"
{: caption="Supported environment variables" caption-side="top"}